Video: The gaming culture, part 1: All the world's a game board

Philip Anselmo

Wednesday

Mar 26, 2008 at 12:01 AMMar 26, 2008 at 10:57 AM

Think we’re kidding? One game alone — "World of Warcraft" — has 9 million players.

Clifton Springs gal Ruth Werts is almost 96 years old and still gets together three times a week with some of the ladies of Ashton Place to sit and play bridge, often for a few hours at a time. She marvels at it, at her own enduring love of it.

“It’s odd, you know, that you can grow old and still remember how to play bridge,” she says. “And no matter how many times you played, you just couldn’t play the same hand twice.”

Travis Nixon, owner of the game and gift shop Coyote’s Den on Canandaigua’s Main Street, says his top-selling game is still "Dungeons & Dragons." Plenty of Canandaiguans congregate at his shop Saturday afternoons to wage fantasy wars via a medium no more complex than a deck of cards, a set of figurines and an imagination.
Folks all over Ontario County still get together for euchre tournaments, Friday night poker or a family game of "Scrabble." Nixon isn’t the only one who still unfolds boards, sets out pieces, counts pips and shuffles cards. Not by a long shot.

And yet...

For better or worse, online other-worlds are sucking in the next generation of gamers. Pixelation is supplementing imagination. Just ask Kian Kenyon-Dean. He’s 12 years old.

Kian is one of the gamers who regularly convene at Coyote’s Den. But he has already begun to phase out some of the old-style figurine, card-shuffling, paper and pencil games. Now, he mostly plays "World of Warcraft" (WoW) — along with 9 million other people all over the globe. WoW is a fantasy role-play game that users play online.
“You pick a character,” he says. He’s a dwarf who hunts.

“You can be a warlock, a mage, a priest or a hunter,” he explains. “There are two factions, the alliance and the horde. I’m on the alliance.”

You would need a flow chart to map out the convolutions of the game. Start with your character. Give it a name. Now, pick a race: say, human or troll or undead zombie. Each race follows a distinct plot, and you act out that story — it’s your fate, both inescapable and elastic. If you are of the race of night elves, for example, you must restore nature’s harmony, upset by evil forces.

Then there’s your class. If you’re a warlock, say, you’re a proficient spell-caster, but you’re weak. Then you learn professions, such as alchemy or blacksmithing. You seek out quests, wage battle, join guilds, fish, explore, cook, trade.

“There’s so much to do,” says Kian. “It’s so big, and you can add so much stuff and do so many different things.”

Then there’s leveling. A character levels when it reaches another rung in the ladder of experience, earned by doing whatever it does. When you level in WoW, you get more access to everything: from the kinds of herbs you can gather to the types of clothes you can wear to the kinds of spells you can cast.

Leveling is the hook for most people. And that’s a big plus in the social-benefits column for such games, says Larry Dugan, assistant professor of computing science at Finger Lakes Community College. In education, the concept of leveling means the difference between static, passive learning and dynamic, interactive learning.

“Students control the speed at which they level,” says Dugan. “If you control the speed, you control everything about it.”

“Traditionally, the teacher was the controller, the lecturer,” he goes on. “Now, the teacher becomes more of a guide through knowledge as opposed to a dispenser of knowledge. It’s all about empowerment as opposed to entitlement.”

If this sounds too much like Lenin addressing the masses, it gets heavier yet: Gaming is the key momentum force of a much broader social evolution, says Dugan. Society itself is morphing into a virtual society, and that means more, not less, interaction.

“One of the kids in the focus group of an interactivity study said that sitting in the classroom is like getting on an airplane,” says Dugan — time to tune out.

“That’s not the way people are going to learn,” he says. “People learn by doing things.”
Say you have just read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” in a literature class.

You can sit and listen to the teacher lecture about the work, but what are you going to remember about that, wonders Dugan.

“Instead, you can read classical pieces of literature, then go into the virtual landscape and build scenes from the book, re-enacting them, making them into visual note cards. That’s engaging for students. And when they’re engaged, they learn and retain.”

Virtual massacre

Of course, someone thus engaged in the virtual has the tendency to become addicted to it, sometimes so much so that reality loses its value and the gamer loses the desire to live it.

In 2005, a Korean man dropped dead of a coronary after playing a predecessor of WoW called "StarCraft" for 50 hours without break, reported the Daily Times of Pakistan. He was 28 years old, the paper reported, and quit his job to spend more time playing games.

That same year, a Chinese girl died after several days of continuous play — friends said she was preparing for a difficult battle in WoW. Other members of the online community held a funeral for her, inside the game. The memorial was raided by a mob who ambushed and cut down the unarmed virtual mourners. The prank was deplored by many and strangely lauded by others.

That bizarre event is emblematic of the two sides of the virtual experience, experts say. Some use the medium to convene, to build a community, and they become truly emotionally involved in the game. Others see it as a means of disruption, satire, parody, a place where anonymity lets them be uninhibited.

So whatever else such games are for us, they are not merely an outlet for children to channel their imagination and hyperactivity. We’re emotionally involved, says Dugan.
Dugan travels the country touting the social and educational potentials of Second Life, a virtual world based on a science-fiction novel where users create avatars of themselves and explore and create a “second life.”

“In these games, people tend to create their other self — call it the id — as reflections of themselves,” says Dugan. “That is, if they like themselves, they will create someone like themselves. Or if they have personality issues, they will create someone else or the negative image of themselves.”

In one study, says Dugan, kids were asked what they liked about gaming, and for nearly all of them, the number one appeal was the social interaction they get in the online communities.

“The other thing is that these adolescents don’t know what its like without it,” he says. “It’s normal to them. They don’t know the world without the Internet. Texting is how you talk to people.”

But it’s not just the next generation that is into gaming, into virtual worlds. Two-thirds of American adults play video games, according to a 2007 survey by the Entertainment Software Association. The average age of the gamer is 33 years old, not 12 or 15.
And it doesn’t stop there.

Second Life has a currency called Linden dollars that have an actual exchange rate with the dollar. Users buy Linden dollars to purchase virtual land where they can build a home or whatever else they want. The Internal Revenue Service is figuring out how to tax virtual exchanges. And news media, such as NPR’s weekly radio broadcast “Science Friday” has a virtual island in Second Life where listeners can ask questions or pick up a tee-shirt for their avatar.

“It’s an evolution,” says Dugan. “It’s dramatic. But it’s not a revolution because it won’t happen quickly. It will change our definition of society. It’s a resocialization.”

And he should know. He plays online poker on a Microsoft Xbox console. Recently, he was playing Texas Hold’em with a fellow from Australia. They talked about the weather.

Tomorrow: For some veterans, gaming is therapeutic.

Daily Messenger

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.

Information

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
The State Journal-Register ~ Street address: One Copley Plaza (corner of Ninth Street and Capitol Avenue), Springfield, ILMailing address: The State Journal-Register, P.O. Box 219, Springfield, IL 62705-0219 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service